2013 Reading Goal Met!

With just under three months remaining in the year, I just completed my goal of finishing 50 books in 2013. Last year, it was a struggle to reach the same number while I finished over a hundred in both of the previous years. I attribute this slow-down in reading to my Kindle. That’s somewhat ironic, I know, but I tend to read lengthier books in digital form than I did when I was reading “tree-books.”

Book number 50 was the second novel featuring Thai crime-solver extraordinaire Jimm Juree, Colin Cotterill’s Granddad, There’s A Head on the Beach. Set in Chumphon Province’s Pak Nam sub-district and dealing mainly with the plight of Burmese fishermen forced into slavery, this novel was even more fulfilling (not to mention laugh-out-loud hilarious throughout) than the first entry in the series, Killed At the Whim of a Hat. I even shed a few tears at several points in the story, including the ending. Of course, that may have been the pain from when my jaw hit the floor at the completely unexpected surprise!

Gone were the Bushisms used as chapter headings in the first novel. Replacing those were bungled song lyrics. It wasn’t until very late in the novel that I suddenly realized those were exactly how Thai people sing Western songs in bars and karaoke lounges. I’d often laughed during gigs here and eventually realized that the singers learned the foreign lyrics phonetically rather than reading them. Oh, and the common mispronunciations of English (i.e., the switching of L’s and R’s) comes into play also.

While I’m waiting for a new entry in the Jimm Juree series, I’ll get caught up on Mr. Cotterill’s books featuring Laotian medical examiner Dr. Siri Paiboun. But for my NEXT book, I’m torn between one set in London’s foggy East End in the 1890’s and Reza Aslan’s “biography” of Jesus Christ. And there’s always the digital pile of yet-to-be-finished books such as a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories by contemporary authors, a fictionalized account of the Borgia family, and a biography of Benjamin Franklin.